A recent briefing hosted by the Alliance for Health Reform and the Kaiser Family Foundation offered Congressional staff and stakeholders a primer on the Affordable Care Act. CHIR’s own Sabrina Corlette joined the panel of experts to walk people through the key private market provisions of this groundbreaking and controversial law.
More states are establishing new special enrollment opportunities to help people gain coverage through the marketplaces. In our latest video about timely health insurance topics, CHIR experts Sandy Ahn and Justin Giovannelli discuss how state-based and federal marketplaces have used special enrollment periods to boost enrollment,
With intense focus on enrollment in the Affordable Care Act marketplaces, enrollment through the Small Business Health Options Program (SHOP) has flown under the radar by comparison. In their latest blog post for the Commonwealth Fund, Kevin Lucia, Justin Giovannelli and Sean Miskell discuss early challenges for the SHOP as well as recent improvements.
The second open enrollment period (often called OE2) under the Affordable Care Act has come to its formal close. Our colleague at Georgetown’s Center for Children and Families, Tricia Brooks, provides her review of OE2 – and some tips on how the marketplaces could improve their performance for next year.
We’ve wrapped up the Affordable Care Act’s second open enrollment season and sign-ups exceeded expectations, in large part thanks to the hard work of navigators and assisters. As part of a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation-funded project, navigators in five states send us their toughest and most complicated cases. To help others facing similar issues, we’ve created a new compilation of our most frequently asked questions during open enrollment. The Georgetown technical assistance team shares it here.
Under the Affordable Care Act, new rules for counting household size and income for purposes of Medicaid and CHIP eligibility were aligned with the calculation of Marketplace subsidies. Following up on a primer she drafted on the basics of MAGI, our colleague at Georgetown’s Center for Children and Families, Tricia Brooks, drills down on income eligibility for Medicaid, CHIP, and premium tax credits.
Health insurance agents and brokers drove a significant portion of enrollment into the Affordable Care Act’s marketplaces in the first year, and continue to play an important role this year. In an issue brief released this week by Georgetown’s Center on Health Insurance Reforms and the Urban Institute, researchers document some of the early barriers to more robust broker engagement with the marketplaces, as well as opportunities for more effective partnerships in the future. Sabrina Corlette has this overview.
CHIR faculty who provide technical assistance to states through Robert Wood Johnson’s State Health Reform Assistance Network have updated their ACA Consumer Services Manual with timely information about premium tax credits and the reconciliation process. Sally McCarty describes the updates here.
The 2014 tax season will be the first time tax filers will have to report on their health insurance coverage. Marketplace consumers, particularly those receiving premium tax credits, will need to take a few more steps when completing their 2014 taxes. Sandy Ahn provides a short summary of tax forms that marketplace consumers will be using.
Auto-renewal through the health insurance marketplaces is an important mechanism for consumers to avoid a gap in coverage, but variations in state and federal approaches could impact consumers’ premiums and tax credits. In their latest blog post for the Commonwealth Fund, CHIR experts compare the renewal processes chosen by 17 state-based marketplaces and assess their impact on consumers’ finances.
The opinions expressed here are solely those of the individual blog post authors and do not represent the views of Georgetown University, the Center on Health Insurance Reforms, any organization that the author is affiliated with, or the opinions of any other author who publishes on this blog.
